


Birth.

by skruffie



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar
Genre: (NSFW in an abstract way rather than explicit), Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Ambition: Nemesis (Fallen London), Canon Non-Binary Character, Fallen London, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, NSFW
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:47:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22079452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skruffie/pseuds/skruffie
Summary: Dreaming of the surface. First-person POV of Casey in the immediate aftermath of their brother's death, and the year and a half that follows. Please note the warnings in the tags and in my notes.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 4





	Birth.

**Author's Note:**

> Another piece written originally in 2013. I added in a couple new lines for this 2020 edition that I felt were lacking from the original. This piece kind of just burst out of my head after I had finished reading The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, which is an excellent but difficult read. A note about the tags: While this bit of writing doesn't get into it in explicit detail, there are references to the abuse that occurred in Casey's past marriage with Vincent that may be disturbing to read involving reproductive coercion and emotional manipulation. There are also some blink-and-you-miss-it passing mentions of physical abuse and self-harm, a rather abstract scene involving sex, and this entire piece deals with life and death juxtapositions including some descriptions of blood. If you are also triggered by heavy Christian fundamentalism, I would advise you skip this one entirely.

Blue, like the robes of our Holy Mother. My mother’s eyes have become blue water: deep pits with creatures swimming so far under the surface that if you venture out too far, you’ll be dragged under. Blue reflections of the sky, brimming with brine that I imagine tastes more bitter than ocean. My own eyes are silt, are soil, like caverns in the earth dug up by God. My father’s eyes. James’ eyes, now lifeless. Hidden. Brown like his grave.

I muse on the fact that blue is a much more suitable colour for mourning than anything.

My mother’s face, stricken pale with grief and her mouth stretched into a thin line, now turned downwards into a permanent frown. We–my mother, James’ wife, the girls–are stuck at home while James’s casket is lowered into the frozen ground. My brother’s body has become a seed at the time of his death—reborn into something dark and cool like stones found at the bottom of the Ouse. His coffin: an external shell holding the lifeless bag of skin and bone will surely crack open someday, and something fresh and new will shoot up from the ground in the spring. We all hope that this grief will come to pass, but I know better. The new thing being reborn in me is something else entirely; a deep sin that I know Father wouldn’t hesitate to try to rip out of my heart. My teeth remained shut tight, and I do not speak.

Instead, I stare hard at the pallid face of my mother and think that this is what the Holy Mary must have felt. My own mother, Mary’s protege, saying goodbye to her only son. We are quick to forget that maybe it wasn’t only Jesus that made a sacrifice. 

–

Half-mourning allows for violet into our wardrobes.

The dresses I’ve worn over the past three months held no room for sunlight. Stark black, reflecting only our sorrow, the texture feeling strangely foreign under my fingertips until I realize that I wish it _weighed_ more so it could match the weight of this grief. I even allow a horrifying thought: the only physical object that could compare with the weight of loss would be the whole of Earth coming down over my head. For a brief moment, I think of London tucked deep underground and imagine it as a giant grave.

I trace the violet ribbon woven into my dress and think. Red, like blood ( _dear James, his colour-red spilling out all over the floor and underfoot; I can’t bring myself to wear those shoes anymore_ ), the blood of Christ, his weeping wounds trailing down his face like tears as he cried out to a Father with his last breath. Blue, like the whole of the universe, like the shroud Mary protected herself with as she brought her hands up to her son’s feet, hearing the last words spill from her baby’s mouth as he dangled high above her head. _In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum._

I think: blue and red make violet. Holiness and sacrifice make a royal.

I think: no one was around to hear Jame’s last breath except for the monster that sunk a dagger into his throat. 

Soak a garment in enough red and it dries to an almost-black. Allow for his blood to seep through the fine carpet and it’ll stain into something the light can’t touch. The body stops bleeding as the heart stops, but I still imagine what’s left of him staining the inside of that fine coffin.

–

Christmas merriment had barely left the house when it happened.

The scene is clear: Vincent and I, standing hand-in-hand on his plans for parenthood, visiting mother and father for the holiday. I vaguely remember when James had left the room, and we thought nothing of it until I heard the dreadful words leave someone’s lips: “Go see where your brother went off to.” His wife hung by, chattering with mother.

The outdoors were covered in a sheen of a killing-frost: my omen, ignored. I stepped out of the warmth and set out to find my wayward sibling, much like how he used to with me in the years before. We were both adults at this point, with marriages and lives ahead, and I did not stop to take a breath and remember the past.

_There is the spot on the porch where I stepped on a simmering beetle and threw a fit; The possibility of Heaven ripped from my five-year old grip until James, wise at twelve years, said that God knew it was an accident._

_There is where father would stand when James would be out with his friends, down by the river. He was only late once, and that was a lesson never forgotten._

The path led me to a shed, and the shed housed my brother. Going on 28, the strength of a man bested by the chiv of a long-gone murderer. A stone flung from the hand of a scared boy, hitting a giant square in the eye and felling him dead. It only takes seconds to end a life, and for what reason, we could never fully know. James adored theology and spoke nothing but kind words to his wife. _James_ , the boy at twelve years saving his naughty baby sister from crying too loudly at a dead insect. The boy-turned-man, success and glory planned for the years of his life. Gone. No reason on Heaven or Earth could explain why someone would kill him.

I didn’t understand at first when I called to him and he didn’t answer. It wasn’t until I drew my foot up from the floor when I realized how strange the texture was beneath. Something was amiss. Something was _sticky._

My memory disconnects here.

I felt arms around my shoulders, holding me like a child as my Vincent took me from the shed. My last glimpse was not of James, but of the rose petals soaking in his blood. Rose petals: delicate, fragile, curling up and darkening as they wither. I do not remember their colour, I only remember their stain. I thought dumbly to myself how they did not belong there. It was winter, the roses should have died ages ago.

I thought dumbly that I didn’t belong there. I turned my life down to those petals: displaced, discovered at the scene of the crime, and contaminated. Scattered like memories. Plucked like broken promises.

Vincent had his arms around me and the men of the house were gathering around the doorway of the shed. I was dragged from there, ripped out of a life that changed in a single gust of air. James’s wife watched from far away, and I could see her eyes wide with fright. I knew, and she knew that I knew, that the special kind of intuition a woman has for when something goes wrong was now singing loud in her head. I knew that she knew it was her husband.

It wasn’t until much later, when I was within the walls of my own house, that I realize I must have screamed. It wasn’t intuition after all. It was the wailing heard from an entire childhood laid broken at my feet.

–

Quite some time after the funeral, we turned to our prayer books.

My mother’s voice, calm like a steady fog, began to speak. She prayed for our enemies. My father was a wordless boulder next to her.

A teacup was in my hand and I tried to sip at it—Vincent’s attempt to sooth the nerves of his shattered wife. Bless his heart. In sickness and in health, til death do us part. In-between the teacup and my hand rested the final thread tethering me to my faith. These were the final seconds of my belief in God, but I no longer wished to pray for our enemies. In my head, the murderer was a distorted figure laying waste to the peace of good families.

_"Oh God, the Father of us all, whose Son commanded us to love our enemies…"_

My fingers gripped the delicate cup tighter, and my ears closed shut on her words. There was no room in my head or my heart.

_"Lead them and us from prejudice to truth; deliver them and us from hatred, cruelty, and revenge–_

She stopped suddenly when she heard my low, humourless laugh. Vincent looked at me like I’d gone mad, and perhaps I did. Long gone was the child trembling in silence against the Good Word of her father and mother. Lost were the days of copying Verse and praying every morning and night. She commanded me to put down my tea and I refused. Why should James’ killer find peace when we have scarcely begun to find our own? Why should I trust at all what the Book has to say anymore?

Her voice pitched into high tones better found on a harpsichord, and the tea cup was dropped from my grasp when her hand struck across hard on my face. Vincent had jumped to his feet and she turned on him next—the first and only time she ever turned against a man—and I remained sitting where I was. The tea seeped the carpet, and as my father took my mother upstairs, I felt the last remaining hold I had on God fade away.

Her baby—her first born, dear baby boy of 27—gone in an instant. Her daughter—wary with years of tree-climbing and half-hearted Bible study, now the rotten apple core of her eye. Vincent knelt before me and I felt his fingers brush against the tingling spot on my face, and the concerned words he mumbled to my ears fell quiet like snow.

I’m fine, I tell him. I’m fine.

–

The time is right for children, he says.

I’m not so sure, I say.

The past year and a half sits heavily on me. My entire life has been cast in shadow. His quiet but faithful wife now moves through the house like a silent mouse; she is afraid to step too loudly on the creaking floorboards and opens doors like she expects the rotten body of her brother to tumble down over her. Cut puppet-strings. Christ taken down from the cross. Limbs gone limp as he touches me, and I turn my head. His kiss lands on my earlobe. I resume the third person: she is unwell, and she has been unwell since that winter. Do not despair, dear, your wife will return shortly.

Or maybe she won’t return at all. Maybe she was buried right along with him, the tiny body housing no infant, tucked up against him like they were children hiding from the thunderstorm outside their bedroom door, no babies born, the family tree cut close to the root. I close my eyes and imagine this is a bleak scene in one of my books.

He dreams of a son. She dreams of a family torn at every seam.

She thinks: my toes are the roots and I am the tree, my trunk must remain strong, I must remain strong, I must, I must, I must–

And his hands run across the bark, like he’s looking to carve their initials together in a heart shape, preserving these fragile moments: Vincent Abrams and Cassandra Banning, the lovely couple, the husband and his bride, holding tiny willow seeds in their palms to bring forth new life. The river feeds, and the green blooms, their marriage bed a lush meadow cusping on summer, sunny and bright. He lays above her like a shelter, and suddenly they’re a boat in the river: waves, waiting to come ashore, movement, sound.

She imagines laying in a meadow, and curls inward to herself when it is done.

She returns to first person; my river run dry. The last glittering sparks in my nervous system dwindle down like coals cooling in the stove. My arms return from being branches, and I flex my fingers. He is beside me, and I do not move so he won’t wake.

–

I find no relief in the pages. One Timothy two, passage fifteen is my despair. Vincent saw it one evening and smirked. The fuel for his fire grew.

The curse put upon Eve was the sorrow and pain of childbirth, and you wish to subject me to that?

I was not taken from your rib. These are the bones of my father and mother. I have been sculpted from ashes and grief. I have been pushed and pulled and scrubbed into dresses and corsets and stockings my whole life. I rallied against lace and ribbons by climbing into trees, hoping to reach God in my own way, and chasing down the neighborhood boys until I tackled them in the mud. My parents rallied against my rebelliousness with switches and meticulous copying of the Verse until my fingers were sore. Honor thy father and mother. The wisdom of the parents, the pain of motherhood, gifts from God. Every day is a gift and I wish to exchange this one for something new.

In the looking glass, I catch a reflection of myself with my hair down. Vincent is several feet behind me, looking expectant. My hair is Lilith-long, temptress long, Magdalene-long. For a moment, I allow myself the longing I try to bury each and every time I go to bed with him: the smooth and flat expanse of his chest, letting my feelings bleed out like a cut until I’m made smooth and empty inside. A void. Once he caught me holding the kitchen knife too-still for too-long, and unwound my fingers from the hilt as if taking a toy from a child. He thought I meant some kind of harm to myself, a step past fingernails. I had been caught up in the day-dream of men’s haircuts.

His eyes are dark, and I know the next steps that I must take. Our lovemaking has come down to a performance, and in some secret, velvety-hidden part of my soul, I enjoy the close contact and the warmth. The joy quickly evaporates when I remember the placement of my body: he is above, and I am below, and this is the way that it has been since The Garden. Lilith was cast out for wanting to lay side by side. I wonder if Eve was ever tired as well.

The show goes on. He feels my skin beneath his broad hands and his face is tucked into the crook of my neck. As far as he can tell, he breathes in the scent of his wife: a good-natured woman, doing her part quite well in this back-and-forth exchange known as marriage, returning kisses while trying to remember what Vincent had said the last time we had seriously discussed our intimate life.

One Corinthians seven, he said. Passage five.

I think: we never seem to be compatible in our timing. What he wants from me at certain times I simply cannot give.

Am I to look upward at my adoring husband, as my role in this play denotes? Mary Beloved, Mary Magdalene, Holy Mary. Mary Blue. Cassandra Blue. The wife. The woman. I am to be a mother. That is the dream that has been written for me since I was cradled in the arms of my own: gone are the long summer days and dreaming. I write not for pleasure, or for dreaming. I write for survival. I write my own Word, but no one will listen.

Yet every time I refuse him, the vision of my body swollen with child swims farther away in his mind. He is becoming impatient. I am becoming exhausted. The vision of a child in my belly makes my skin crawl and my thoughts float upward like a summer heat, in the same curious, frightened way I feel when I start to feel trapped. Trapped in closets. Trapped in cupboards. Trapped underneath, stuck under this moving form of man when he touches me, like he can’t feel the filth under my skin. Perhaps he has grown used to it. Perhaps I should best be used to it too, but I just want rest. God, give me rest. I am so tired of this life.

–

Vincent says “Melancholia.”

The doctor says “Hysteria.”

More words buzz around my head like insects: bed rest ( _this was not what I meant_ ), cheese and milk. Restriction of movement. You’re ill, dear. You’re just ill. Motherhood is a gift from God, and your refusals just mean you have a bit wrong with you, that’s all. Eve does not refuse Adam. Don’t be scared. Sacred birthrights—it’s all natural. All-natural remedies. Pelvic massage—no other man has touched me than my husband. The rest cure.

Instructions: confinement. No, no, no. No. NO.

Rejection does nothing. My futile refusals have fallen on deaf ears. The “no”s pass from my mouth like a quiet breeze—unheard and unseen. I bite my lip. I am invisible, my skin warping to reflect the wallpaper in our guest room. I will have to make do with studying each line on the wall, as I will be staring at it for the next several weeks. Oh, dear God. _Deus meum_. I know you hear me up there. I’m sorry I rejected you, I’m sorry, I will not refuse you, I will not, I will not refuse. I will—my will is strong, it says no, no, no, NO–

It takes a few nights for my head to fill with suffocating dreams of damp cloth pressing down over my mouth, or of walls closing in until I’m locked up tight. I close my eyes and I am buried alive. I close my eyes and my body is wracked with ocean waves before I’m pulled under the water deep. I wake with salt in my eyes and in my throat, and my doctor still eyes me from his little chair next to my bed. He takes notes on every bead of sweat on my forehead and wants to suggest restraints the next time I try to tear the skin on my own chest.

This body has not been my own. It has never been my own. This body has belonged to others; my spirit belongs to Christ, my body belongs to Vincent. My mind cannot bear it. I switch to the third person, like I’m just a character in a book. This trick works well for me.

She becomes Lot’s wife, marble and stone and salt, hard as crystal and twice as fragile. Night after night, offered up to the lust of the man, forgetting she has heat, forgetting she is a soul in a body, forgetting she is a person, a person, not just a wife and _not_ a woman and _there_ it is. The Cassandra, dressed up black and blue and violet and red, is a person.

And the person wants _out._

The doctor has lust too, but of a different kind. He takes physical notes on this person’s health, and takes secret notes on this person’s wealth. Slowly, she starts to come back from third person. Slowly, she becomes me, and me becomes I, and I begin to see a way out of this tiny room—my casket, my coffin. My ring has been weighing heavily on my finger like a chain bolting me to this unwanted life. Chains bolting me to someone else’s dreams. Someone else’s life.

Two weeks into torturous bedrest, and what it takes is an assurance of real gold in exchange for secrets.

As I disappear into the night, I heed the warning from the story of Lot’s wife, and I do not dare look back.


End file.
